News and Events - School of Arts and Humanities

LAST SUMMER, COLLEGE students Char- lotte Cotter and Willa Mei Kurland, both Chinese adoptees who grew up in American families, decided to search for their birth families. The women posted about their quest on Chinese social media, and within 24 hours Kurland’s foster mother reached out, overjoyed. Meanwhile, a Chinese re- porter dug through records at the hospital where Cotter was born and identified her birth parents. But both women’s stories turned out to be complicated. Kurland’s foster mother, who found Kurland on her doorstep, had wanted to adopt the baby herself. But the population-control authorities forbade the adoption because the woman already had two sons. After being threatened with legal action, she relinquished the baby the day before Kurland’s American parents — who knew nothing of the controversy — arrived to adopt her. Cotter’s birth parents said they made arrangements through an intermediary for a specific childless couple to adopt her, but a passerby assumed she’d been abandoned and took her to the police station instead. Cotter’s and Kurland’s journeys are among the nearly 100 oral histories col- lected by Associate Professor of Journalism and Digital Media Jena Heath for Our China Stories, a digital archive of personal narra- tives from the Chinese adoption commu- nity. China’s one-child policy, implemented in 1980 and relaxed in late 2015, gave rise to the country’s international adoption pro- gram. But as Heath found when she adopted her daughter, Caroline, from China in 2008, the details of the adoptee’s life before adop- tion are often difficult to confirm. Heath decided to gather the stories of other adoptees so that, as researchers wrestle with questions about the Chinese adoption program, they will have access to first-person narratives from adoptees as well as their families. Her next project is to collaborate with the Munday Library to incorporate Our China Stories into the library’s digital collection. “We need these voices to be accessible to scholars,” Heath says, “so we can have a better understanding of how people are thinking about their own histories.”